AMD shows off reference tablet

AMD has published a video with live demonstrations of a reference-design business tablet as well as multimedia-oriented convertible notebook-tablet device. Both designs are based on the company’s next-generation APUs and have some interesting functions. Both demos used reference designs of convertible tablets with detachable keyboards. These are similar to the North Cape design used by Intel to show off the power-efficiency of Haswell chips.

It is starting to look like AMD is following Intel into its obsession with hybrid gear. The business-oriented tablet is based on quad-core Temash accelerated processing unit which has four Jaguar x86 cores and Radeon HD 7000 graphics engine.The reference design fully supports Turbo Dock technology and thus comes with a dock containing a keyboard and more ports. It also has an active cooling system that cools the tablet when it is docked and means that its chips operate at higher frequency.

AMD Turbo Dock adjusts performance of the AMD accelerated APU higher while a hybrid PC/convertible/tablet is docked and being used for more complex tasks like content creation. The Turbo Dock is designed to lower power consumption when in tablet mode to save battery life and extend movie or video watching and web browsing time. AMD Turbo Dock technology is expected to appear this year on equipped hybrid systems built around the Temash SoC.

So far the only thing wrong is that during the demo the AMD spokesman had to manually tell the system about the incoming undocking. AMD also demonstrated AMD A6 “Kabini”-based reference design of a convertible notebook-tablet. While the A6 “Kabini” belong to low-power/entry-level family of chips, the convertible with the APU inside easily ran Torchlight II video game in 1920x1080 resolution at around 25fps in DirectX 11 mode.